Education Marketing

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

We have just gained the highest ever click through rate on an shared email campaign to schools.

Now I know I am writing a lot about shared emailings at the moment, but there is a good reason.   I invented shared emails in September, so obviously I want to tell you how clever I have been in coming up with something new.

But more than that, unlike some of my wild and whacky ideas shared emails work in terms of getting teachers onto commercial web sites.

In the shared email to maths teachers one of our clients got 138 click throughs to their site – for a total cost of £99.  That’s 138 coming to the site, ready to explore and potentially buy.

It is because of figures like these that Hamilton House is expanding the shared email service constantly – and here is an advance announcement of one development.

Each shared email consists of five companies promoted to one teacher (there’s a copy of what a shared email looks like on http://www.emails.gs/sample_shared.html) and until now the order in which companies appear in each email has reflected when they have booked.  The first in goes on top, etc.

We will continue this for the next week, but from 6 December we will be offering the chance to companies to pay a little extra to guarantee top spot.   So, to be clear if you book into one of next term’s shared emails in the next week you can get top spot (if no one else has got it – and if they have we can put you in second) without any extra charge.  After that there will be a small additional cost.

There’s a full list of dates for shared emails for next term (but the single remaining date for this term) on http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html

Any questions – do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood (currently feeling rather full of himself).

Last week we offered a postal shared mailing to secondary schools with a bonus: everyone taking part got a free email campaign as well.

For most of our customers they not only got leaflets into all the secondary schools for around 7p each, they also got a free emailing using our personal email list (an emailing that would have cost another £300 or more had they bought it separately).

The great benefit of this approach is that it allows companies to know whether they are getting sales from the postal shared or the solo email campaign – without paying any extra money.

Anyway, we’ve been asked several times if we will do this again – and I’ve managed to twist the arm of colleagues here to say yes.

The date selected is 12th January.  Do a shared mailing to 5000 secondary schools on that date and you will also get a free email campaign to go with it.

However there’s a twist.  We need to have the leaflets delivered either by 5th January.  In effect that means on or before 22 December, or on 4th or 5th January (our warehouse being shut in between).

The price for a single leaflet in the postal shared mailing is £375 plus VAT (up to 15g).  If you would like to book in please do call 01536 399 000.

And if you are interested in our occasional news items on the creative side of direct marketing there’s a news group just for that.  Email creativedirect-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Tony

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

It is sometimes suggested that in late November and through December there is not much point advertising to schools – on the grounds that everyone is thinking about Christmas.

In the past, when our main mechanism for communication with schools was the post, there was a certain element of truth in this, because the post does slow down in December.  If you are wanting to do a solo postal mail campaign I would say that this should be done in the next 10 days or so before all the Xmas postings start.

But with the advent of blogs and emails in the last couple of years we have found that email campaigns can do well in late November and December – teachers it seems will read their emails even when rehearsing a Christmas concert – and not all of them are involved in such an activity – especially in secondary schools.

As always we will keep our news services to teachers running until the end of term, and we’ll keep all the email services running.

Unfortunately all the shared email places save one have now been sold out between now and Christmas – the one remaining is a single place on the Secondary English shared mailing (getting your email out to 10,000 addresses for £99 – details on http://www.emails.gs/Email10000.html – where you can also find next term’s dates for shared emails.

As for the rest solo email campaigns, it is a case of booking in before someone else does.  We do restrict the use of the email addresses we have in order to stop teachers turning away from them and not reading anything – so it is a case of first come first serve.   There’s a list of personal email addresses on http://www.emails.gs/PersPrefLists.html and our most responsive subscription lists are on http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html

If you are interested in using any of these lists please do call 01536 399 000 and ask for sales.

And as always, all the day’s news on schools and schooling is on www.ukeducationnews.co.uk

This week half a dozen readers of this service forwarded me links to a web site that had started advertising opt-in lists of teachers.

These ads caused a bit of a stir because of the high numbers of teachers that appeared on the lists.  For example, under headteachers over 80% of secondary heads appeared to have opted into the list.  In primary schools quite often there are over 50% of schools where (for example) the “Head of Geography” or head of any other subject have opted in to an email list.

This raises the question: what is “opt-in” and how could these numbers be so high?

Of course as always I declare an interest – Hamilton House researches email lists and sells these lists.  So someone coming along with massively higher numbers of teacher email addresses than we have is indeed a challenge to us.

Apart from the fact that our research shows that under 50% of primary schools have actually allocated personal email addresses for teachers, what worries me is this phrase “opt in”.  Consider this…

If a person fills in an on line form to apply to receive emails is that opt-in?  My view is “yes” this is the classic opt in.  In fact it is so strongly “opt in” we call this “subscription” – the person has “subscribed” to receive the item.

If a school is phoned and the secretary asked “can you give me the school email address of the head of history?” is this opt in?  I would say no – we call these “personal” email addresses, not opt in.

If the secretary says, “send it to me, but put the teacher’s name on the subject line and I will forward it” then absolutely no – that is not opt in, nor is it personal.  But I am starting to suspect other firms are using different definitions.

In fact in the last few months I have seen a number of offers from different companies of personal email addresses of teachers, where the numbers are, to me, impossible to believe.

I guess overall if you are looking at such a list you need to ask questions – and just in case you want to ask questions about how Hamilton House does it, here’s the answers.

Our list of “subscription” teachers lists is at http://www.emails.gs/emailteachersdirect.html These teachers subscribe to a weekly news letter and also receive occasional adverts (no more than once a week) written in our house style.

And if you want to see how these people subscribe, the answer is at http://www.schools.co.uk/subscribe.html

Any questions, do give me a call on 01536 399 013.

Tony Attwood

If you take part in the shared postal mailing to secondary schools on 24 November you will be able to find out definitively which approach to marketing works best for you.

The reason is simple: on that date if you do a shared postal mailing to the 5100 secondary schools in the UK you will also get a free email campaign to go with it – and for most of our customers that means a free use of our personal email lists.

But your leaflet in the shared postal mailing does not have to be the same as the email that we send out free.  What’s more it doesn’t even have to be to the same teacher.   And it doesn’t have to go out at the same time.

So you might send out a leaflet to (for example) the Deputy Head, but send out the email to the Head of Music (or any other teacher).  You might advertise one product or service on the postal shared mailing and a different one on the email.

There’s a further benefit: after we have done the free emailing you will get a report telling you how many people clicked on the link between your email and your web site.   (If you don’t want to have a link to your web site, you can also set up a separate email address and have people reply to that – so you can see exactly how many enquiries came from the postal mailing and how many from the email).

The list that we offer for the free email depends on who you want to reach – but in most cases it will be our free premium “personal email” list of teachers, which goes directly to teachers, and not via the school office.

The shared mailing is on 24 November, which means we need material by 16 November – although if you ask very nicely we might be able to stretch this to 17th.

There’s more information at….

http://www.shared.org.uk/FreeEmail.html

Tony Attwood

I was going to write about an educational news topic today, but even our rolling news service www.ukeducationnews.co.uk (which is school rather than HE focussed) is dominated by students throwing things, and that’s squeezing out all the other news.  So here’s something else…

I’ve recently been writing quite a lot about emails and shared mailing campaigns.  Figures coming in from the first shared emails in terms of click throughs by teachers to the web sites are very encouraging, once again validating this type of marketing.

But to change the focus for a moment… given that email marketing is a lot cheaper than solo mailing, is there any point in solo mailing any more?

Email marketing can cost anything from 1p per school for a shared email campaign up to 20p per teacher for a subscription service email (where each teacher reached has subscribed).  A shared postal mailing costs around 7p.

So that’s the range – under 1p to 20p, and of course the response rates tends to follow the cost (although with e-shared mailings I may have got the pricing wrong – our clients seem to be doing rather well out of the deal!)

But back to solo: roughly speaking a solo mailing to schools is going to cost around 45p per school.   With other prices so cheap, why bother?

The fact is a solo mailing can get actual off the page sales of 3% for products in the £25 range.  Not every time of course, but it can happen.

And because of the higher response rate, it is possible to test out a solo mailing with a random trial.  In this we might mail 300 schools (cost about £135) and see what result we get.

Let’s say you make £20 every time you make a sale, and you know that it costs you £45 to mail 100 schools, you know that a 2% response rate makes you a minor loss.  That might seem bad news, but if you also collect the details of each person to whom you sell, and you have other products to sell that person, then you could look to the longer term, and count that as a profit.   Alternatively you might say you need 3% to make a profit.

So we do the mailing to 300 schools.   If you get 9 sales, you have made a profit and you might well want to mail all the schools that are relevant to you.  If you get 2% you’ve made a loss – but a very small loss, and we can try again, maybe changing the text slightly.

Such trials are worth while because they really allow you to get your product out to the wider market, get you into a number of schools, and help you collect email addresses of interested teachers.

If you would like to know more, do give my colleagues or myself a call.  01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

Is it still worth advertising to schools this late in the term?

I was a little shocked to be asked that yesterday, as it is a question normally reserved for December – but since I have been asked, here’s the answer.

While school managers knew that their budgets were secure between now and April 2011, in the spending review last month they were also told that these budgets were secure for the next two years too.  Schools are not facing the cuts every other sector of government funded society is facing.  They are now back to normal spending of school funds.

Although many schools did continue to spend in the normal way in the period before the spending review, some did hold back on expenditure.  Others, who were hoping to be part of Building Schools for the Future, were holding money back as part of that.  Now they find there is no BSF they are releasing that money for other projects.

In terms of timing in general in the last few years we have experimented quite a lot with mailing right the way through the autumn term, and although I would say that response rates to postal mail fall away after the first week of December, this is not true with personal email.

To help show just how much life there is in the market, (and as mentioned before) for the final shared mailing of the year (24 Nov) we are giving each customer a free email campaign (which would normally cost around the same price as the shared mailing.)

The shared postal campaign will get your leaflet into the 5100 secondary schools in the UK for just £375 which is 7.3p per school.

In addition you can nominate any secondary school teacher or department that you want to reach by email and we will email those teachers using our personal and preference email lists – the lists that get the highest response rates among school emailing.  (If you do nominate a teacher where we don’t have the list, we’ll discuss alternatives with you before we take the booking – but we do have lists for most teachers now).

All you have to do is to tell us which list you want to email and we will undertake the emailing for you.

If you are interested we must have your booking and your leaflets by 16 November.  If you want to book in please do call 01536 399 000.

Tony Attwood

I recently posted an article highlighting the term dates until April.

Unfortunately I used the original Standard School Year dates, as published by the Local Government Association, stupidly forgetting that they had more recently published a “Revised” schedule, following objections from a number of member of authorities.

Full apologies for my error.

Here’s the correct details

This means that the Easter days of Good Friday and Easter Monday (22 and 25 April) are now incorporated into the Easter holiday.  Schools return on the day after Easter Monday.

Schools may of course take the first day or last day of term as training days.

Tony Attwood